Saturday, February 18, 2006

Cadaver Lab -- not many notes, and the ones that I have are inauspiciously smeared. (ook.)

Knowing the inside of the body is an exercise in reducing density and replacing it with light. After you examine cadavers, no longer will the inside of your own body be a relative unknown.

Examining cadavers is an exercise in learning yourself.

Complete learning cycle: Take in information; interpret the information; re-create the information.

The structure of the inside of the body can be understood as a series of nesting cylinders -- from the sheath of the epidermis to the dermis, the hypodermis, fascia, muscle, bone, marrow. The various organ groups are sheathed, as well, and each cylinder is bound to the next with greater or lesser connections. For muscle groups, from the outside in, the various cylinders of flesh start tightly bound, becoming more mobile and less tightly bound as you move in toward the bone.

The next time you perform a twist, consider the various cylinders that must move relative to one another. Keep in mind that a student with skin that binds may not be able to move into the twist deeply, and so may experience the entire edge of the pose at the skin level.

When performing twists yourself, consider the very elements of your body -- how it affects your abdominal organs, your diaphragm, how it twists your rib bones, compresses the nerve cluster near your spine, pressures the aorta, tensions the bindings between fascia and obliques. Think small.